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January's Toast to Tech Evil
comforteagle writes "In this month's mocking toast To Evil! Danny O'Brien laments the holiday habit of trying to hide one's evilness from Father Christmas, but finds those evil tech companies can't help being who they are. 'I'm really hoping that in their next batch of cinema adverts, the MPAA addresses this, and shows a grumbling adware developer instead of a Hollywood set-painter. The piracy issue, it affects us all: the construction guy, the lighting guy. And me, the guy who installed all that crap on your mum's computer. And also an awful lot of Los Angeles-based cocaine dealers. Why doesn't anyone think of them?'"
"If you tattle you both get in trouble. You might get in more trouble than they will."
Not if they infect something which is public domain (didn't some of Elvis' music just become public domain in the uk?) in another country and hence legal to download, but illegal to run unauthorised software on someone else's computer (like in the UK under the computer misuse act ?).
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
Personally, I feel like cheering. Overpeer are doing more for killing the WMA (and probably WMV) formats, and their DRM, than anyone else. Also, for a site that can be really harsh on people who get their PCs infected with viruses/adware because they did something dumb, /. seems remarkably forgiving of "I downloaded this illegal WMA file from some random guy on the Internet and played it".
Two wrongs do not a right make. EVERY crime has a victim - most have many. In this example:
it depends on what was stolen (do insurance companies come into it? do they have to pay out?), if the buyer was hurt in the theft (health insurance now, plus one less spot available in over-busy hospitals), etc. etc.
Posting corrupted/nonsense files disguised as copyrighted media wastes bandwidth that we all share, and makes it that much more difficult for the authorities to track down the real pirates. Posting spyware-infected media files does all of the above, plus provides examples of how to do it to more vicious crackers.
The logic of Overpeer - "we'll hurt them cause they're hurting us, and maybe if they're hurt enough they'll stop" - is the same ass-idiot logic that justifies all retributive crimes, from the genocides in Rwanda, to the violence in Iseal, to the terrorist attacks on the US (depending on whether you believe that religion is the source of the hate or just a convenient way to recruit dumbfucks ready to kill themselves). It didn't stop the killing in Rwanda (which is now spilling into the Congo), it didn't end the violence in Isreal (which has finally petered out only because of a natural-selection "regime change"), and there are more terrorists now than ever (and the body count climbs and climbs). It will not stop pirates. Overpeer is not part of any solution, they are simply sanctioned criminals.
Who to complain to? Your congressman would be a nice start. The FBI would be another interesting choice. You don't need to incriminate yourself to report a crime. If the FBI asks how you got an Overpeer-infected file by doing something legal, just tell them that you were doing their damn job - as they seem too busy, you did your patriotic duty to collect evidence for them. The fifth is your friend.
It's hard to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys.
Yes, but when you feel that a law is not morally justified, civil disobedience is and has been in the past a legitimately recognized way of protesting it. Sure you run the risk of getting in trouble with the proper authorities if caught, but private citizens have no right attacking you. If I park my car in the middle of the road the police can arrest me or tow my car, but random guy X who's inconvenienced by being late to work doesn't have the right to get out of his car and start defacing mine. This is what Overpeer is doing with their malware bundled with the music files (I don't have a problem with bad music files, it's the malware that bothers me).
Sigs are for the weak.
I download warez all the time. CD ISO's, and sometimes movies etc.
It's not illegal (not here), because I have the originals. The software I've yet to find a program for that will successfully rip an ISO mountable with daemontools (most ones I download don't work either, but eventually I usually get lucky). Movies I've just not the time to rip-and-reencode. But it's much nicer to have a bunch of 600MB DivX files so I can fit multiple movies onto a DVD (for travelling with my laptop) or CD-images so I don't need to constantly disc-swap.
And whose fault is it I'm downloading? The MPAA/Software venders, because they've installed anti-piracy measures that suck against piracy but restrict my legitimate imaging/etc. Is my downloading hurting anyone... no, but if the MPAA/RIAA seeds a network with virii it certainly could hurt my computer.